Mitski, "Laurel Hell" (Dead Oceans)

"Let's step carefully into the dark," Mitski sings to begin her new album, and continues, "Once we're in, I'll remember my way around."

Strategic, sure-footed, vulnerable and prepared to face all sorts of trouble: That sums up Mitski's songwriting as it has unfolded on the albums she has been making since she was a music student in 2012. Over the decade she has chronicled yearnings, frustrations, messy romances, the life of a performer and the persistence of doubts and questions. Along the way, her music has moved through piano-centered orchestral pop, guitar-driven indie-rock and, with "Be the Cowboy" in 2018, a willingness to try for pop bangers.

On "Laurel Hell," Mitski takes just half a step back from that extroversion. Largely electronic and inward-looking, the album is filled with a pandemic-era sense of isolation, regret and reassessment. Yet she doesn't entirely reject pop gloss, especially when she can give it an ironic twist.

Her new songs grapple with depression, uncertainty, dependence and separation; she's constantly observing and interrogating herself. Her melodies are long-breathed and deliberate, sung with calm determination, while the arrangements veer between austere, exposed meditations and perky, danceable propulsion.

Throughout "Laurel Hell," Mitski, now 31, both misses and rejects her youthful naïveté. In "Working for the Knife," she struggles to pull herself out of a creative block: "I always thought the choice was mine," she sings, "And I was right, but I just chose wrong."

Mitski deploys a full pop arsenal in "Love Me More." Its title is concise and hook-ready; But the music's confidence utterly belies the raw longing in the lyrics. She's trying to discover the will to go on, fighting anxiety, wondering how everyone else gets through "another day to come, then another day to come," and begging for someone who can "drown it out, drown me out." All of her musical command can't stave off the dark.

JON PARELES, New York Times


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